Note: This document is work-in-progress. Please don’t publish it on news sites, or otherwise link to it in public without the author’s permission. Private linking is acceptable.
Another essential program to use is a good web-based bug-tracker. Joel Spolsky has an article about the motivation and strategy for bug-tracking, which is well worth reading.
The reason you need it to be web-based is so that it would be accessible from all operating systems, so it can be exposed to the outside and so you wouldn’t need to install a client on all machines. Microsoft’s internal bug tracking system is not web-based (for legacy reasons) and they’ve been criticised for the fact that Internet Explorer, unlike the Mozilla-based browsers, does not have a publicly available bug-tracker.
Furthermore, in a previous workplace of mine, I was stationed on a Linux workstation (which was the deployment platform and what I like working on), and found that I couldn’t interact with our bug-tracker, which only had a windows client. Its more recent version already had a web-interface, but they wouldn’t upgrade for fear of breaking the other people’s workflow. This indicates another problem in not having a standards-compliant web-interface that can run on most browsers.